Ike's Place, the wildly popular sandwich shop in the Castro District San Francisco, has hit on its best business promotion ever - eviction.

Facing a perfect storm of sandwich litigation - a 9:30 a.m. court appearance at Superior Court today and a possible eviction at 6:01 a.m. Wednesday - everyone seems to want to get their final secret sauce fix. More than 100 people were in line at 1 p.m. Monday, and owner Ike Shehadeh says they served a record 1,500 customers on Sunday. The Castro is more crowded than ever.

"It's still raining people," he said Monday. "I know we've said before that we don't block the sidewalk, but today we are." Some Castro renters and homeowners aren't impressed.

Meg Whitman says she would defend Proposition 8;members of the Castro Community grow increasingly uneasy.

Gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman said this afternoon that if elected governor, she would defend Proposition 8, which prohibits same-sex marriage, by appealing a recent federal court ruling declaring the proposition unconstitutional.

Whitman made her clearest stand to date on the issue while speaking at the warehouse of Solar Gard Window Film in San Diego, hours before she's scheduled to address the California Republican Party's convention downtown.

San Francisco mayor and California lieutenant governor candidate Gavin Newsom hopes to be less associated with marriage equality than he's been in the past. This disheartens the Castro Districts GLBT community.

The Bay Citizen reports that the Newsom — who issued marriage licenses to same-sex couples in 2004, leading to a lawsuit that reached the California Supreme Court and reverberated nationally — is distancing himself from the issue of marriage equality. After admitting to the newspaper that he's chosen to be less outspoken on the topic of gay marriage, especially in light of the August 4 federal court decision that ruled Proposition 8 unconstitutional, he said: "[Same-sex marriage] is at a completely different level now.

The Human Rights Campaign will drop both Target Corp. and Best Buy, two companies embattled over donations that aided an antigay politician's campaign, from its annual Buying for Equality Guide. Castro residents are boycotting both businesses in support of equality.

In a Friday statement, HRC vice president of communications Fred Sainz said the national organization "will not encourage people to shop at either store and believes that consumers should make their own decisions after careful consideration of all of the information available to them.

In late 2006, community members came together in response to three highly publicized aggressive assaults on members of the LGBT community, and from that meeting the Castro Community On Patrol (CCOP) organization was formed. CCOP is a Community On Patrol Service (COPS) entity. COPS provide training, a simple uniform, and some basic equipment to community volunteers who patrol their neighborhoods by foot, bicycle, or motor vehicle at various times throughout the week. COPS volunteers provide a very visible presence through distinctive and typically brightly-colored uniform jackets and t-shirts, orange in the case of CCOP. The volunteers provide an extra set of "eyes and ears" for the community and for law enforcement, as well as providing an intimate knowledge of their own neighborhood and its usual and, perhaps more importantly, its unusual patterns.

At the twelfth hour, a compromise was reached between the developer of the 2299 Market development proposal and a consortium of organizations including DTNA, organizations that had appealed the project proposal to the Planning Commission. Eureka Valley Neighborhood Association, Castro Area Planning & Action, Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association, Livable City, SF Bicycle Coalition, and Walk San Francisco were partners in this collective effort.

The developer agreed to some of the pedestrian safety improvements and to full height ground floor retail in the building, while the community organizations agreed to a higher parking standard and to the affordable housing ("inclusionary") units not being provided in the development.

Chatter about a promotion for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton continues from Beltway pundits, who say that President Barack Obama could use the lift by selecting her as his vice presidential running mate in 2012.

The evolving relationship between Obama and Clinton has remained a popular topic since the 2008 presidential election. In the latest take on the team of rivals idea, Clinton adds competency to the ticket and helps to raise her one-time adversary's sagging poll numbers.

According to The Wall Street Journal, "Former Virginia Gov. Doug Wilder, his state's first African-American governor, touched off the controversy. Writing at Politico.com last week, Mr. Wilder argued that Mr. Biden's tenure has been undistinguished and chock full of 'too many YouTube moments.' He charged that Mr. Biden 'has continued to undermine what little confidence the public may have had in him.'"

Some even suggest that Clinton could switch positions with Biden, the Journal reports.

"Pundits jumped on Mr. Wilder's comments and expressed near-universal approval. On his syndicated national show, Chris Matthews of MSNBC assembled a panel to discuss the Wilder intervention. Howard Fineman of Newsweek, a longtime Hillary watcher, said Mrs. Clinton would accept a place on the 2012 ticket 'in a second.' John Heilemann, a reporter New York magazine, said the major obstacle would be to 'figure out a way for Biden to slide aside happily' and suggested that Mr. Biden replace Mrs. Clinton as Secretary of State."

The suspect who stabbed Philip Dimartino, 36, inside his 138 Hermann Street apartment last month "might have been cut during the stabbing spree," and police are asking for the public's help in identifying the killer. Flyers have been distributed in San Francisco"s Castro District. Known as the gay lesbian, bisexual and transgender community Dimartino was believed to be a frequent visitor to the neighborhood. Dimartino, a senior marketing manager with Archstone, was stabbed several times in the torso before dying, but, according to BCN (via CBS 5) "police believe the killer might have been cut on the hand during the assault, a detail that could help in making an identification."

The California legislature passed a resolution asking the IRS to tax same-sex spouses and domestic partners the same way it taxes heterosexual married couples.

The resolution, AJR29, passed the Assembly 59 to 2 on Monday.
The taxes of the 18,000 same-sex couples who married in California before Proposition 8 passed are quite complicated because while their state taxes can be filed as the married couples they are, their federal taxes cannot.
The Defense of Marriage Act prevents the federal recognition of these marriages, which extends to taxation.

Antigay Republican Tom Emmer is making headlines for benefiting from Target Corp.'s $150K contribution to a conservative PAC supporting his bid for governor of Minnesota.

What isn't making many headlines is the identity of his likely opponent. Pro-gay former U.S. senator Mark Dayton is in the lead heading into the August 10 Democratic primary, facing off against for the gubernatorial nomination against Minnesota House Speaker Margaret Kelliher. An heir to Dayton-Hudson Corp. fortune, Mark Dayton is the great-grandson of George Dayton, who stared the Dayton's department store chain. In 1962, Dayton's opened the first Target, a discount department store.

But she says the campaign takes Target's support of Emmer "as a sign the CEO and other executives take Mark Dayton's promise to tax the richest Minnesotans" more seriously.

Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel defended Target's contribution in an e-mail to employees Tuesday, saying the company supports "candidates on both sides of the aisle who seek to advance policies aligned with our business objectives, such as job creation and economic growth." He went on to defend the company's commitment to LGBT rights as "unwavering," writing that inclusiveness is a "core value" of the company.

But gay activists aren't pleased with the donation, and a boycott of Target is gaining momentum.